“This show has now made Pokémon creepy to me.” Augmented and Alternate Reality Games, Interactive Narrative and the Documentary TV Series Hellier

Presenter: David Sweeney
Registration Number: 024
Institution: The Glasgow School of Art, Scotland

Abstract: The title of this paper comes from a March, 2021 post on the sub-Reddit dedicated to the online paranormal investigation TV series Hellier (2019 - ). The poster, Dessie_Hull, states they can no longer enjoy the Augmented Reality Game Pokémon GO (released in 2016) after watching Hellier because a ‘goblin’ in the game resembles images emailed to Greg Newkirk, one of the investigators in the series, by an individual who claims these beings are real and dwelling in the Kentucky town that gives Hellier its name. The first season of the series (2019) shows Newkirk receive a series of cryptic communiques, after his first excursion to the town, from a mysterious underground figure associated with both occult practice and anarchism known as Terry Wriste (a play on the word ‘terrorist’) urging him to continue the investigation. As the season progresses, Newkirk, and the investigative team he has assembled, begin to suspect that they are being manipulated by Wriste for his own enigmatic ends: at the end of the second season (2020) they come to the conclusion that the events of the first, including a string of seeming coincidences/synchronicities, were in fact a form of esoteric initiation orchestrated by Wriste which has fundamentally altered their view of the world, even though they never actually encounter the Hellier ‘goblins’. Both seasons are presented as documentary and the team has continued to maintain that the series is a work of non-fiction. If this is true, it is possible that the team was, unwittingly, involved in not an Augmented but an Alternate Reality Game, designed by Wriste. Regardless of whether it is a genuine documentary or not, the series certainly represents the investigative team’s immersion in an interactive quest narrative comparable to such Alternate Reality Games as Joseph Matheny’s Ong’s Hat from 1988 – widely considered to be the first Alternate Reality Game and, like Wriste, associated with both anarchism and occultism - or The Jejune Institute (2008-11) devised by Jeff Hull, which appears to be influenced by Situationism. The team’s immersion parallels the experience of Hellier viewers, such as Dessie_Hull, who are active on Reddit and other social media platforms where they discuss not only the series but also the numerous esoteric texts referenced by the investigators throughout both seasons. It may be, then, that Hellier is not only a work of fiction but also itself an Alternate Reality Game, in which viewers who believe that it is a work of non-fiction are unwitting participants to the extent that, for Dessie_Hull, it has affected their participation in an Augmented Reality Game, the obviously fictional (being based on an existing media franchise) Pokémon GO. In this paper, drawing on recent discussions pertaining to both Augmented and Alternate Reality Games and the consent (or lack thereof) of participants – including claims that the QAnon conspiracy movement is an Alternate Reality Game gone awry – as well as a range of literary, media and game theory, I will discuss Hellier in the context of the history and development of such games, using the examples mentioned above as points of comparison and focusing on the interactive narrative elements of the series.

Bio: David Sweeney is a lecturer in The Glasgow School of Art's Design History & Theory department specializing in popular culture, a subject on which he has published and presented widely. Publications include journal articles and book chapters on such topics as music and nostalgia in Twin Peaks: The Return; the Marvel Cinematic Universe; the development of the Marvel comics universe; time travel cinema, digital comics and the relationship between media technology and the ongoing Folk Horror Revival. His critical studies of the novels of Michael Marshall Smith and the Netflix Originals series The OA are due to be published later this year by Subterranean Press and Auteur respectively.

Exploring-Deconstructing Reality with the Interactive Storytelling.

Presenter: Sevcan Aytaç Sönmez
Registration Number: 050
Institution: Yaşar University, Izmir, Turkey
Abstract: Black Mirror is a ground-breaking, sensational, staggering, critical science fiction TV series depicting a dystopic near future and present time. It is concerned with various themes about society, environment, technology, social media, power, dehumanization, and cyborgs. From the beginning of the series, each episode is focused on these themes with an innovative approach by using creative narration styles. But the most innovative boom of Black Mirror is definitely the interactive episode Bandersnatch. Mainly, Bandersnatch focuses on “reality.” With the characters and their actions in different pathways of the fragmented plot, the main issue is “reality” and “perception of reality,” or the illusion of the world. This questioning is being made by a medium—cinematographic narration—which constitutes itself as an art form of representing and reproducing reality but also defined as “illusion of reality” in some theoretical approaches. Nothing could be more creative than to bring together this approach on filmic reality in questioning “reality” with an interactive filmic narration. So, this article combines theories on filmic reality and the main approaches on illusion of reality in cinema, with the narrative style, spectator experience, self-reflectivity in Bandersnatch. Going further on the theme “reality and illusion” we can refer to the extensive literature of philosophy. The philosophers have been asking the question "what is reality" for ages. In relation with the focus of Bandersnatch we can remember William James with his “multi-reality” approach. Or focusing on “time and reality” notion, which is one of the constituting layers of the narrative, we should refer to Henri Bergson and his concept of multiplicity and the notion of time as “duration.” From Bergson, necessarily we should jump to Gilles Deleuze’s “time-image theory” arising from Bergson, in order to understand Bandersnatch as a philosophical narrative interrogating reality by using a new cinematographic form.

Bio: Sevcan Aytaç Sönmez was born in Turkey in 1983. She lives and works in İzmir. She is an academic at Yaşar University at Art and Design Faculty, Film Design Department. Her articles were published in national and international journals. Her first book Remembering Through the Movies was published from a well-known national publisher in Turkey. She has written book chapters, which were published nationally and internationally. A chapter entitled “Modernism, Memory and Cinema” was published in Film and Literary Modernism, edited by Robert McParland (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013). The national book chapters are “Hard Times, 1990’s Turkish Cinema” in Reflections of Modernism, edited by Eric van Zührer and Funda Barbaros, in 2017. “We Are All in Blockade, Time and Style in the movie ‘Abluka’” in New Frames: Cinema in Turkey, edited by Serhat Serter, in 2017. She is one of the editors of a recent book entitled Women’s Camera, Women Directors After 2000s, 2019. Her academic study areas are cultural studies, gender issues, and urban studies. Apart from theoretical works, she is engaged with experimental filmmaking and video art. Her films were shown and awarded in various festivals.

Carne y Arena by Alejandro González Iñárritu: Subordinating VR Technology to Refugee’s Human Condition.

 
Presenter: Hudson Moura
Registration Number: 077
Institution: Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada
Abstract: Carne y Arena by Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu is an immersive mixed reality installation that allows visitors to walk barefoot across a beautiful sand desert while experiencing violent incidents by crossing the Mexican–U.S. border with illegal immigrants. Later, the visitors realize that they witnessed real-life accounts, which they can hear displayed in videos at the exhibit’s end. Thus, the visitors can get a better sense and understanding of refugees’ traumatic and powerless experiences.

 

The installation comprises three different rooms, a waiting (cold) room filled with authentic immigrant shoes, the actual six-minute VR experience, and a wall displaying the refugees’ video portrays. The waiting room is freezing like the rooms migrants stay in if the border patrol captures them. To feel the refugees’ vulnerability, the visitor needs to leave behind all their possessions, including their shoes and socks, before entering the VR area. 

 

Carne y Arena’s mixed reality combines VR performance with physical components turning it into a multisensory and bodily immersive experience (Jerald 2015; Kors et al. 2016; Lanier 2017; Uricchio 2018; Raessens 2019). While the VR headset creates a 3D virtual world, the installation considers the visitor’s body to invest it, embed it, and inhabit it with physical reactions and emotions provoked by the wind, temperature (heat and cold), ground texture, etc. Thus, sound, smell, touch, and sight operate at once, enhancing refugee’s storytelling. Another crucial component is the documentarian aspect. Engaging real-life stories through VR assist visitor’s recognition of characters’ traumatic experiences and their emotional reactions.

 

According to Iñárritu, he intended to subordinate technology to the human condition. “I despise technology,” says the filmmaker. According to him, technology does mean nothing unless it can reveal or denounce a human’s situation. Therefore, technology must be subordinated to humans, to humanity, and to the arts. However, has the film lost the power to engage the viewers emotionally? Can virtual reality simulate refugee’s dispossession (the sense of the self) while alleviating society’s consciousness?

Bio: Hudson Moura is a lecturer on film, new media, and global justice at the Department of Politics and Public Administration and an associate faculty at the Immigration and Settlement Studies Program at Yeates School of Graduate Studies at Ryerson University. His scholarly work has been presented at numerous international conferences and published in English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. Currently, he is writing a book on refugees in films. As a documentarian, his films portray artists, writers, and culture. He served as a film programmer for several film festivals in Toronto. He has also facilitated numerous hands-on workshops on documentary, mobile filming, and video editing in universities and film festivals. He is a member of the Betinho Project Group, which aims to promote human rights, food security, and participatory democratic processes. He chairs the Interactive Narratives and Interculturality on Film and Media Research Group, focusing on the politics of race, migration, gender, and minorities (Indigenous, Black, anti-racist trans- feminist and queer) related to technology, media, and digital practices. (http://www.hudsonmoura.net)